David Kastrup <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Peter Galbraith <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > > > We do care about free software, we even treat documentation like > > software. Something that the FSF doesn't even do. > > Uh, what kind of logic is that? > > "We care about children, we even treat dogs like children."
Your leap of logic, while very colourful, implies that documentation is entirely different from software. Since we treat both programs and documentation as "software", your analogy doesn't hold water. The fact is that we extend the same freedoms to documentation as we do to programs. They are both software. We don't water-down the freedoms for documentation. Whenever I have read RMS write about the GFDL, it has always seemed artificial to me to "sell" a manual for the price of a non-removable political text. He doesn't want to make the text unmodifiable yet removable because people might exercise that right and his manifesto might disappear from some distribution channels. There are plenty of working channels to distribute that content without forcing it on anyone. The fact that it is forced on people makes it lose it's value and credibility to me. "You can't teach non-violence while beating your wife" as your collegure said. You can't effectively preach freedom while removing freedom to do it. The ends do not justify the means. It's hypocritical to me. > > We have to not betray the ideals of the Free Software Movement to > > prove that their documentation license is non-free? That makes no > > sense. > > Uh, the Free Software Foundation is perfectly aware that the FDL is > not a free _software_ license. It was never intended for software, > but rather for documentation. It was never intended to be equivalent > to the GPL, in which case it would have been rather pointless to write > it. The FSF can use whatever license it wants. Debian can choose to distribute the works or not. Emacs and it's manual are two separate works, distributed under separate licenses. One of them is too watered-down for us to accept as free. Emacs is so tightly linked to its documentation and it may appear broken without it. That's not Debian's fault. Personnaly, I find that a good argument for considering the Emacs manual as software, which should be GPL'ed. The disagreement won't be resolved on this list. Even if we convinced you, that wouldn't change RMS's mind. Even if you convinced a few of us, that wouldn't change Debian as a whole either. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
